Doom
by IStoleThatFromYou
Summary: Everybody has a story to tell; not all of them are edited.
1. Chapter X: Beginnings

Subject #901 (Human): Curtis Stahl

CASE FILE: CRIMINAL

His thrashings tore the legs of the medical table halfway out of the Martian concrete, rocking it violently from side to side. Curtis Stahl, a criminal condemned to execution on Earth for the mass murder of innocent women and children, laughed maniacally. Here was, Doctor Carmack thought, one of the centuries most prolific monsters, delivered unto us by the powers that be. Was it fate?

"Curtis Stahl" the Doctor began, halfway between his prisoner and a troupe of scientists, "you have been tried and convicted. Found guilty on multiple counts of homicides, you have been sentenced to death". The doctor smirked at Curtis who, fixed upright as much as his restraints would allow, locked eyes with his executioner. The murderer's expression narrowed; his attention moving around the room.

It was a medical laboratory. White human-like figures watched silently from one side, eclipsed by the fluorescent light of a surgical lamp hovering above, humming. The scientists stood in front of a mirror, motionless; Curtis could not tell the beginnings of one from another.

His vision faded, slowly. The doctor sedated Curtis, and began preparing for the procedure. His arms slacked, his head lowered. He slumped back to the cold metal table feeling nothing; lifeless to the world.

Subject #902 (Human): Faith Rayne

CASE FILE: CRIMINAL

She was sedated.

Little can be said for a human who is unconscious. Sleeping or otherwise, something is lost on observation of a person at rest. The C-24 had taken and that was all that mattered.

Over the coming hours the subject's body would begin to transform; description served no purpose for this act. Only the certainty, Doctor Carmack thought, of change.

She would gain physical properties: strength, speed, an inhuman recovery rate. At a cellular level he was bored to death of reminding others existed, they were witnessing a miracle. History had been made and unmade by the profound efforts of the few. What did the past matter?

When she woke, it would be to a new world. One still with disease, and war, famine, and death. But one with the hope for real change.

She would be part of a different world.


	2. Chapter Y: In Which Our Hero Wanders Off

She is dead.

The world is spinning, and for Doctor Carmack it is the end. A career in biogenetics train wrecked by the catastrophe lying before him. The project would lose its funding, surviving experiments would be terminated, and the facility shut down.

Where would he go? He had no family. Where would he live? He had no home.

For the first time in his life Doctor Carmack was alone.

He thought back to the company induction fifteen years ago. A personal transport shuttle reserved for private use, a warm smiling face instructing him on the purpose of his work, the red dunes of Mars drifting across the landscape. Memories, to be piled into the furnace and burned with their work.

Years of work. All of it would be forgotten.

Doctor Carmack knew what followed: passed on as a subordinate serving under someone just like him in another division with countless others competing for their role. The thought hurt. Exiting the laboratory leaving the body behind, he navigated the military labyrinth of tunnels and corridors to a surface elevator.

The research facility was housed underground with a single elevator shaft rising to an open air platform. For security, the base had only one entrance and exit, with the surrounding population centres built miles away in case of containment breaches. As the roof above parted the elevator rose level to the height of a dune, its edges buried beneath it making it look like part of the landscape.

Stepping off into ankle deep sand, Doctor Carmack wandered off. For as far as he could see, though he did not care to look, the world around him was barren; lifeless red hills rose and fell into a rolling illusion, ending only at the planet's horizon. And for as much as Doctor Carmack knew, though he did not care to think, it was all moving. Too slow for some to understand. But it was, in the end, always moving.

The winds of Mars blew hard overhead.


	3. In Which Not Much Happens

"She is alive"  
"Then Doctor Carmack - "  
"Was wrong"  
Silence filled the conference room; a projector fan whirred gently.  
Four scientists sat at the head of a large polycarbonate desk, each examining the evidence along with their individual predicaments.  
Another, a non-scientist, sat opposite shadowed by the projector's glare.  
"Nothing matters beyond this". The scientists were confused by this statement. Was their work meaningless? Or was it a threat?  
In either case they sat, listening, saying nothing.  
"As was inevitable we have collected Doctor Carmack; officially he has ceased working with us"  
"A breach" one of the scientists asked.  
"Exactly".  
"And the end of his professional career. But he has not been removed altogether".  
None of them stirred. They all knew what it meant: the project would continue  
Without Doctor Carmack, how could it? But it would never be by choice; that is not how life on Mars worked. The scientists exchanged looks.  
"Previously classified data will be made available to the four of you. Doctor Carmack is under strict instructions to help in any way the four of you feel necessary".  
A fate worse than death, one of the scientists thought.  
"The body of the girl, 902 I think, will be cremated and disposed of. You will all see to this".  
"But -"  
"She is a dead end. Accept it and move on".  
The non-scientist rose from his chair, along with the scientists, and exited the room.

The projector fan whirred.


	4. Revelations

They burned the body without hesitation.  
"Where is Carmack now" one of the scientists asked.  
Nobody answered; they did not know.

The smell of burning skin blew back in their direction.

* * *

Originally the research teams were outfitted for low interval shift rotations; a handful of squads to a team composed of four or five men, always men, would be cycled between various duties and positions matched according to individual talents. Naturally those initially selected profiled to experience, or some unseen, legendary, half buried prospective ability, the former preferred to the latter. Candidates were then recruited in sets.

If an individual dropped out the process would begin again, usually with the same remaining candidates, until a suitable match was found; all of this depending on one very large public register. A name pulled from the system altered the predicted result for all other profile queries with selections made automatically; with time, a database query would become its result.

In both theory and practice the system worked, right up until our discovery: an excavation at the delta of a Martian river. A pair of team members digging through the soft Martial soil had slipped into an unexposed underground cavern.

In actual fact they were sucked through, pushed under by the weight of Mars' atmosphere, pulled under by an ancient yet well preserved vacuum. The rag dolls of their bodies fell at least a mile before making contact with hard ground, leaving a difficult rescue operation to be undertaken and delaying our work.

We knew however, before any manned excavation, that the cavern was the first of its kind; seismological analysis following the accident revealed it to be a gap between two dead tectonic plates that had risen at an angle following interior cooling. The walls of the cavern were two opposing sides of former prehistoric continents. Etched deep into them, the history of Mars.

Our team members' sacrifice had led us to our dreams.


	5. Fear

Blood filled phlegm burst onto the floor. Doctor Carmack wheezed.  
"You're looking well".  
The voice, one Doctor Carmack did not recognize, rumbled through the empty prison block's speaker, rattling the iron cage bars to which he was tethered.  
A small chuckle burst across the room.  
"They tell me this is as close as I can get. I don't want to infect you, after all"  
Doctor Carmack opened a swollen eye, but saw no one. The speaker sighed.  
"I know you know me, Carmack. I do not know you, but you know me".  
"And I have come here, today, to tell you that this is not the end. Not yet, anyway".

Doctor Carmack began to sob.

* * *

The descent took everything.

In the beginning we believed that what we were doing was right. Good, even, convincing ourselves of its importance. Unborn generations would worship their forefather's discoveries, settling the worlds of the stars in the night sky. Failure fell to superstition as, for the first time in decades, our team witnessed a new reality dawn across the scarlet sky of Mars.

Down into the cavern we went. Safeguarded by an unquestionable faith - for who, seeing a new sun rise on a foreign planet, could doubt anymore - we dropped straight to the bottom in search of answers.

Setting foot a mile beneath the surface we lit our expedition torches and began mapping what we could to build a picture of where we were. Looking up from the bottom of that cavern, stood between two colossal pillars rising into oblivion, we saw the distant pinprick of a twinkling light and little else.


	6. Bad Fiction

At first we did not recognize it, too focused instead on the crystal deposits, rivers of glittering white crawling along the walls next to us in great streams.

We fell upon it, by accident almost; the cavern was a tear in the planet's skin and an open wound into which we crawled, uninvited, examining and questioning leaving no stone unturned. Our handheld torches lit the bowels of the cavern, their light painting brief flickering shadows through which we stumbled.

One of the junior researchers tripped, plunging into darkness. We cast our lights on their position, and then we saw it. All of us saw it.

A body. The junior researcher collapsed to its side, head bloodied and dazed. Some of us went into shock immediately, others not seeing it until trying to help her up.

Once the vacuum had broken, decay set in. The body had started to fester, and was fully rotted by the time it was prepared for moving.

But in that moment, each member of our team lost collectively in stunned silence, the walls of the cavern slurring our suspended torchlight into alien hues dancing along the outcrop of rocks and boulders, the broken body before us, we realized what we had known all along.

What we could never admit to ourselves in our most private being until that day. What, in those few moments clarity affords for humans in their rarest and most precious moments of existence. What we had been moving towards, since we stepped foot onto this desolate and hostile world.

We realized why we were here.

* * *

"Do they know?"  
"Of course"  
"We must act"  
"Say nothing"

The scientists stood on the elevator platform, preparing for the inevitable.


	7. Molecular Disintergration

The shooting did not stop.

A week had passed since Carmack's disappearance. In the uncertainty, a small team had gone to ground before the elevator was shut down, heading westwards towards the Capital. Carmack had been moved, the scientists concluded; they had missed their chance.

The fighting had continued across the underground laboratory ever since the initial coup divided it into two factions; those loyal to the regime, and those who wanted to survive. Within the last few days, splinter groups had formed in the chaos.

Roundabout loyalties pushed many to extremes they could not withstand. Isolated, some hid to await rescue. The rest turned themselves into animals, shooting ceilings and drywall in their own vein attempts to survive, killing each other by coincidence.

In the end, fighting for survival always meant one's doom; the regime ruled supreme. The scientists, desperate to finish what they had started, acted with final intent.

They would pass beneath the archway.

The team found it whilst taking sediment samples for analysis; a large hollow mouth emptied slowly of the surrounding sand – the same sort that had sucked their team members through – was unearthed lacking inscription or meaningful detail. The archway was excavated and moved, along with the body, for further research.

It stood now in the centre of an empty room.

The scientists heard the slaughter of regime forces approaching and barricaded themselves in with it; there was, they saw, no going back. They approached the archway and stood at its lip, dwarfed by its size, standing shoulder to shoulder the four of them barely filled it. Their time had come, and with it, everything that would remain.

They stepped through.


End file.
